Metaball Active Element Panel is missing
I think it's working, but admittedly in a weird and unintuitive way (and there's no visual indication of what is happening), which might be considered a bug. I've submitted a fix here.
Steps to reproduce:

Add a metaball
Deselect all (the transform panel remains present)
Switch out and back into edit mode (the transform panel is gone)
Select the metaball again (the transform panel returns)



If you are aware of how the &quot;active&quot; selection works with other selectable things in Blender, this behavior makes sense:

Only one object/element may be active at a time. In rare cases (e.g. there are no objects), there may not be an active object.
The active object is the &quot;last individually select object&quot;; that is the last one clicked on.
Deselection doesn't affect the active object.


If you try this same exercise with a mesh object, you get roughly the same behavior, but a rather less confusing &quot;Nothing selected&quot; message in the transform panel when nothing is selected.